Lots of people arrive here looking for rural business ideas. That’s why I keep coming up with more and more ideas you can use to start your own small town business. Here are three new ones to spur your thinking. My grandmother’s 1941 Kerr canning manual Teach canning classesIf you learned to can from your…
The US Postal Service is bringing back a very old idea in an attempt to keep afloat in very modern times. The USPS is studying more than 3,600 post office locations for possible closure. At the same time, it’s looking to contract with about 2,500 small grocery and convenience stores to create “village post offices.” The…
I don’t know why it is that people like cows so much, but they do. And there is an important tourism lesson in that. Stargardener had a great time meeting my cows. Pam Mandel, Nerd’s Eye View, spent July in Austria amongst a dairy herd. Her conclusion? She likes cows, even when confronted with the realities…
Could it be that the Great Plains is outpacing the West Coast in social media adoption by small and medium sized businesses? Yes, it is possible. Zoomerang, the online survey people, did a survey of more than 500 small and medium business decision makers. The results were released June 15, 2011. “Less-populated areas or cities…
You’ve experimented with social media. You’ve learned the tools. You know what you’re doing now, and you’re pretty comfortable. How can you take it to the next level? A friend and I talked about this exact question this weekend, and I’m sharing the answer with you. The Secret: Stop talking about you. Listen to them,…
You have to break out of your existing limit in some dimension in order to grow. One way to look at your business limits is through the Four P’s of Marketing. (A little rusty? Get the refresher course at The Four P’s of Marketing.) Now break them Draw four big circles on a piece of…
How much do you know about your competitor’s website? Do they get more traffic than your site, or less? What keywords are sending them the most traffic? Compete.com can give you the answers. Put in three website addresses. Compete will give you their traffic chart. For websites with enough traffic, it will also give a…
Some businesses are hard to sell. In fact, more businesses simply close down than sell. * I may have a third option for some businesses. Friendly construction workers in Lima, Peru(Apparently, I don’t have a lot of construction photos.) I met a man who moved from the big city to a small town. As he…
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